Two days after attack, Fremont Sawade sat down to write his first, and only, poem

Fremont “Cap” Sawade is 91 and his eyesight is fading. He can’t read the poem he wrote all those years ago, right after Pearl Harbor.

Dec. 7, 1941 was a sunny Sunday morning. Sawade, assigned to an Army anti-aircraft regiment, was in Honolulu on liberty, having breakfast. Loud explosions sent him racing to his base in a cab. He could see the Japanese planes flying low, dropping bombs and strafing battleships with machine gun fire.

“I was just plain mad,” he said.

Back at Camp Malakole, Sawade ducked for cover when the Zeros strafed it, too. How unexpected was the attack? Sawade said his unit didn’t even have ammunition for their big guns.

Two days later, with the wreckage of the Pacific Fleet still smoking, he sat at a desk at Hickam Field and started writing a poem. He’d never written one before. He hasn’t written one since. But over the next week, this one flowed out of him.

He called it “The Fateful Day.”

It captures how idyllic life was, before. How lucky the service members felt to wake up every day with a view of Diamond Head.

It captures their surprise, and then their anger at the Japanese, including a slur that was common then, offensive now. It captures the horror — “A hot machine gun’s chattering rattle/Mowed men down like herds of cattle” — and the raw thirst for vengeance.

“The poem was just a heartfelt thing,” Sawade said. “It was a very emotional time when I wrote it.”

He came home from the war to his native San Diego, worked a variety of jobs, including 10 years as a building inspector for the city of El Cajon. He got married and raised a family and lives now in Rancho Bernardo with his second wife, Gloria.

Over the years, he showed the poem to a few friends. He shared it a time or two in military newsletters. But the truth is he never thought it was anything special.

Museum piece

Rod Bankhead is Sawade’s son-in-law, and a military vet himself. He served in the Air Force during Vietnam. A student of World War II, “I have enormous respect for everybody who lived through that and did what they did,” he said.

In January, he read the poem for the first time. It moved him because of the way it documents “all the shock, agony and emotional resolve of those young men and women who became the very fabric of the Greatest Generation.”

He thought others should see it, too — now and forever.

He wrote first to President Obama, seeking his help in getting the poem put on display at the Smithsonian. He contacted Sen. Dianne Feinstein with a similar request.

Feinstein’s office reached out to the Smithsonian, which suggested the National World War II Museum in New Orleans might be a better place for it.

Bankhead had a trophy company in Carlsbad turn the poem into a wooden plaque. He sent it to the museum shortly before Memorial Day.

Now it’s Sawade’s turn to be moved. “I never thought much of the poem until Rod got ahold of it,” he said. “Now I’m just really proud.” Saturday, family members gathered in Rancho Bernardo to honor him.

It’s not clear what the museum plans to do with the plaque, but Bankhead said he hopes it will go on display so that visitors can read the poem and “fully grasp the experience, passion and patriotism that it portrays.”

There are actually two copies of the wooden plaque. The second hangs on a wall in Sawade’s house, right next to his favorite chair. The poem is etched into the wood. Even though he can’t read the words, he can feel them.